I have read numerous Project Management SE questions on this subject, as well as done a fair share of Googling. I am aware that different incarnations of this question have been addressed before, but I have not found something that provides me a clear answer.
I am the PM in a 20-person team, including some remote resources. We develop or maintain about 10 applications. About half the team works on most of the applications, which are stable and have no real product owner or roadmap except for production fixes or improvements that the team comes up with internally. The other half works on one or two applications that are highly impacted and require modification when the company comes out with a new product every few months. Those one or two applications also have production fixes and improvements that the team comes up with internally. (We're basically at liberty to modify them however we want, as long as the business continues to be supported.) I'm new to the team so I don't know yet how much those applications can be future-proofed to mitigate the sudden urgent modifications. There is some overlap between the two sub-teams but the applications are sufficiently different that resources are not completely interchangeable.
The team has been trying to adopt scrum for a few months prior to my arrival, but with practically no product owners, no cohesive long-term vision for the applications as a whole, and little interdependence among the breakfixes, I don't know if scrum is the right way to go. I've read about combining kanban with scrum but can't seem to wrap my head around it. Scrumban sounds nice but it is so much newer and less mature that I am hesitant to adopt it. What would be the best way to manage this team so the load is level across all resources, we work at a sustainable pace, and we have a somewhat-defined goal to guide our development efforts?